For the last few days i have been reading a lot of threads about authority sites and keyword research. Following one particular method, I wrote up a bunch of KW's and headed over to the Google KW tool. My search term was a mildly nsfw KW and below you can see the KW results the Google tool came up with.

It doesn't need a genius to figure out that these are anything but low competition keywords.

My question is -
a) Why the hell is Google telling us that they are low competition?
b) Why is the cpc so low?

Mighty confused with keyword research as of now. How are you guys able to filter out well paying KW's with low comp?

The Google keyword planner tool is for Adwords advertisers, not for people looking for free search engine traffic. Therefore, the competition tab reflects the level of competion for that keyword amongst advertisers. Since the level of competition is low, the CPC is expectably low as well.

In order to find out how hard it would be to rank for any keyword, you have to use a keyword research tool meant for search marketers. A good example is long tail pro; another is market samurai

Lastly, you have to analyse the sites on the first of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to ascertain whether their sites are highly optimized for that keyword or not and whether they have a huge head start.

Porn is a saturated niche so SEO competition is huge. Try to target low monthly searches keywords say between 1,000-50,000 . Screen them more with software like Market Samurai and then look for setting up site.

Porn is a saturated niche so SEO competition is huge. Try to target low monthly searches keywords say between 1,000-50,000 . Screen them more with software like Market Samurai and then look for setting up site.

Click to expand...

I did just that (reduced monthly search number) and a lot of relevant results to my KW came up (unlike the porn ones in the screenshot).

I have a follow question. On a lot of posts i see people saying that you do not need a special market research software to find great keywords and that it all can be done on the free. How true is that?

I don't know who is saying what but Keyword Research is a combination of various steps which needs to be followed and not a straight forward formula.

Yes it can be done FREE provided you are able to manually check your competitors ON page & OFF page SEO quality. This is where software's like Market Samurai makes your job easier. If you could search the download section you may get it.

I did just that (reduced monthly search number) and a lot of relevant results to my KW came up (unlike the porn ones in the screenshot).

I have a follow question. On a lot of posts i see people saying that you do not need a special market research software to find great keywords and that it all can be done on the free. How true is that?

Click to expand...

You can do it for free, but you're very limited.

As bullsbears says above, you can check the on and off page with opensiteexplorer,majestic, ahrefs, but you're limited to how many sites you run through them when you're just using the free option.

Usually paid services and software has a lot of importance to 2 kinds of people: those who have a lot of time but also have a small amount of cash to invest and to speed up things... and those who make money from what they're doing but want to go even further...

If you don't have the money... you can spend weeks, months checking stuff that you could easily check in less than 1 hour using paid services.

So to summarize, people researching KW's merely use these numbers to
- figure out monthly searches
- cpc
- competition (assuming that the low competition in advertisers could mean an unsaturated niche)

Then it's onto using Market Samurai or equivalent to study the off/on page SEO of the competitor. In the end all these factors lead to the final call on wether to use a KW. Am i anywhere close to the mark ?

So to summarize, people researching KW's merely use these numbers to
- figure out monthly searches
- cpc
- competition (assuming that the low competition in advertisers could mean an unsaturated niche)

Then it's onto using Market Samurai or equivalent to study the off/on page SEO of the competitor. In the end all these factors lead to the final call on wether to use a KW. Am i anywhere close to the mark ?

Click to expand...

Low competition in advertisers does not mean unsaturated niche. It means not many advertisers are targetting that keyword and your CTR would be low if you choose such a keyword because there will be lot of unrelated ads.

Low competition in advertisers does not mean unsaturated niche. It means not many advertisers are targetting that keyword and your CTR would be low if you choose such a keyword because there will be lot of unrelated ads.

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